Untitled 

Michel Carrade, a French artist born in 1923, created this untitled painting using oil on canvas, though we don't know exactly when. It's characterized by vertical bands of color, a format common to much abstract painting since the early 20th century. The painting prompts questions about the role of abstraction in post-war French art. Was it a retreat from the social realities? Or did abstraction offer a new visual language to express complex emotions? Carrade exhibited widely in France, a country with a rich tradition of state-supported art institutions and this kind of artistic patronage inevitably shapes the kind of art that gets made. The painting’s non-representational style might be seen as either a challenge to traditional academic art or as a continuation of its formal concerns, only stripped bare. To better understand this work, we can look to exhibition reviews, artists' statements, and the broader cultural history of France in the mid-20th century. Art always operates within specific social and institutional frameworks, and it's up to the historian to reconstruct them.